While football teams in the Pac-12 and the Big 12 play nine conference games each season and the Big Ten is about to follow suit, the Southeastern Conference recently announced it will stick with eight conference games.

Stanford coach David Shaw is not happy about that, especially now that there will be a four-team playoff beginning next season that will depend on a level playing field for each conference.

He said he was “more disappointed than surprised” by the SEC decision. “It’s bigger, I think, than most people understand.”

The College Football Playoff selection committee won’t prescribe the number of conference games leagues should play. The panel “will not be in the business of dictating to conferences their scheduling,” playoff executive director Bill Hancock said this week. He said a team’s entire schedule would be considered in evaluating whether it was worthy of the playoff.

Shaw wonders how that will play out, when SEC teams regularly schedule a weaker non-conference opponents late in the season to break up the grind of playing difficult conference opponents back to back. Last season, for example, Alabama played (and crushed) Chattanooga the week before its regular-season finale against Auburn.

“I’ve been saying this for three years now,” Shaw said “If we’re going to feed into one playoff system, we all need to play by the same rules. … Don’t back down from playing your own conference.”

Shaw said, “There’s no taking away anything that Auburn, LSU and Alabama have recently accomplished. They’ve been phenomenal. (But) we’re playing nine of 12 teams in our conference. Why can’t you do the same thing?”

Last season, he pointed out, his team remained ranked in the top 10 despite two losses by virtue of its difficult Pac-12 schedule. Seven of the nine conference opponents it faced were ranked in the top 25.

“That’s a gauntlet that you have to run in our conference,” he said. “You don’t get to schedule a nonconference game in week eight, nine or 10 to break it up.”

Stanford plays Notre Dame each year as one of its three nonconference opponents and has scheduled future games against Northwestern and BYU.

If an SEC team fails to make the playoff because of an inferior strength of schedule, Shaw suspects, the SEC will probably have to reevaluate its eight-game scheduling philosophy.